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This was me. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was the television industry's worst nightmare. Now, I may be its best hope.

For years, the phenomenon of cord-cutting -- people choosing to get their entertainment over the internet rather than via cable or satellite TV -- was a strictly hypothetical, if logical, bogeyman. No more. In the past year, the number of U.S. households with televisions has declined by more than 472,000, or 0.4%.

Well, make that 0.39999999999%, because as of tomorrow, I will be living in a domicile with cable for the first time in 13 years. I'm not sure how I feel about that, though.

The term "cord-cutting" wasn't yet in circulation when I first decided I could live without television in the house. At the time, it was strictly a matter of money and space. My first full-time job out of college, as a junior editor at a company that published medical journals, paid $23,000 a year, not nearly enough for me to afford a luxury like cable nor an apartment with enough extra floor space for a TV set. (In those days, sonny, a TV was a box you had to put on a table of some sort, not a flat thing you could hang on a wall like a picture.)

My TV watching was limited to what I could grab at bars, at other people's homes or at the treadmill on the gym. Occasionally, I'd rent a show from the video store. Very occasionally, I'd buy a season or a series.

After a few initial months of withdrawal, this came to seem like a form of penance for a childhood and adolescence spent watching way, way more TV than was healthy. (True story: In seventh grade math class, we had to draw pie charts showing how we spend our time. Mine allotted a full quarter of each day, six hours, to TV.) I read a lot. I did stuff. Eventually, it came to seem like a pretty good way to live.

In short, I was in danger of becoming one of those insufferable "I don't watch TV" people, but then technology rescued me. Netflix got big and made it easy to catch up on shows I'd missed without calling around to Blockbuster stores to hunt down the next disc. Soon enough you didn't have to have a disc at all, just a reasonably fast internet connection. Then Hulu launched and made it possible to watch shows the day after they aired. It was heaven. I could even watch some sports and other live TV thanks to a little device called Eye TV that let me watch broadcast channels on my laptop with the aid of a plug-in antenna.